ERP for Retailers Whitepaper: Connecting your people

ERP for retailers can change the way you do business by giving your people added insight into the business.

The retail environment is constantly evolving. Consumer tastes change, reducing the profitability window for products in stock and shrinking allowable time-to-market for new lines. Online sales growth rates exceed older channels, causing retailers to focus more on their e-commerce sites. New markets emerge, established market sales slow. New suppliers offer chances to reduce cost of goods sold or ensure product availability. Growing social and environmental concerns influence consumers’ product choices. New competitors and new regulatory requirements squeeze profit margins. Population shifts mean that new stores must be opened, and their performance must be measured against existing stores. Faster inventory turnover requires more, and more cost-effective, marketing campaigns, which require faster, more accurate price-point analyses, merchandising, assortment planning, and so forth. Everywhere you look, solutions that worked yesterday may be broken today. Managing change requires insight into all aspects of the business. The more factors that change, and the faster change occurs, the more essential insight becomes.

Information technology is indispensible in gaining insight, but technology itself changes. More robust applications hit the market. Computing hardware grows smaller, more powerful, and more mobile. New approaches such as “cloud” computing emerge. User-friendliness improves. And the long-term total cost of ownership (TCO) continues to trend downward. Technology solutions that were state-of-the-art yesterday, and perhaps adequate today, almost certainly will be problematic tomorrow, making it more difficult to gain essential insight into your business. A major reason for this is the end-to-end “connectedness” of your business processes and operations. Over time, it will become more and more difficult to manage the interconnected elements of your company using a set of point solutions that are cobbled together with proprietary interfaces.

To learn more about how ERP for retailers give your people incredible insight and change the way you do business download the entire whitepaper.